New Mobile App Detects Skin Cancer

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The School of Medical Science and Technology at IIT, Kharagpur has developed a smartphone application, called ‘ClipOCam-Derma', to help physicians speed up skin cancer diagnosis. Lead by research scholar Debdoot Sheet, this innovation has recently won the ‘GE Edison Challenge 2013’ in Bangalore.

"Being a portable and affordable solution, it can be used by trained health care workers to reach out to elderly and patients in mobility restricted areas for health care delivery," Sheet said.

How It Works

Along with the mobile app, a clip-on device is illuminates the patient’s skin using a colorful flash while the smartphone’s camera captures a sequence of images. The images are then uploaded to the ‘DRICTION’ cloud computational imaging service.

The images are then processed to provide consolidated diagnostic information to skilled physicians to assess potential risks. The mobile application will assist in fast and high-precision screening of skin lesions and abnormalities such as cancers, melanoma, ulcers, psoriasis, and lypoma.

"This in effect will facilitate high-throughput screening of patients at resource constrained or remotely located healthcare centers lacking even minimal access to expert physicians, but witnessing an exponential rise in deaths related to complex skin abnormalities," Sheet said.

Accuracy and Availability

‘ClipOCam-Derma' will be launched after regulatory approvals and Sheet said tests have found it to be 99% accurate.

Note that this mobile app is only available to hospitals and trained physicians. Although there are ‘so-called’ skin cancer diagnosis mobile apps available for iPhone and Android for under $5, the accuracy of those apps is questionable.